By Drew Lynch
The only people who haven't yet written a memoir are those currently thinking about writing one. But most traditional agents and publishers aren't interested in memoirs written by non-celebrities. Large publishing houses generally consign such unsolicited submissions to the slush pile, a kind of literary purgatory where the stories of great souls languish for a time before disappearing altogether.
I am not a celebrity, despite a tendency I've long demonstrated for crossing paths with them (see above). I must find another way. After spending the better part of a year writing this memoir-ish work of literary nonfiction, I reached The End, experiencing a mix of relief and rush of immense satisfaction. Both proved momentary. I had finished telling a story. The time had now come to start selling it.
The first publisher to review my completed manuscript offered me a contract, with an advance! It was gratifying, yet, I hesitated. In this interregnum—between becoming a writer who has written a book and an author who has published a book—I happened upon Publishizer and decided to “test drive” my work here, first, while continuing to weigh other publishing options.
Launching a preorder campaign with Publishizer enforced a measure of discipline upon me heretofore never required in my previous writing life as a working journalist where I had faced deadlines to produce three or four articles per week, none more than five-hundred words in length, all relatively self-explanatory.
I came to Publishizer with a bloated 90,000-word first draft and immediately confronted the first step of any effective preorder campaign—to distill the essence of all I'd written into a brief 60-word synopsis, providing brevity and clarity for an elevator pitch I would soon email blast out to the world.
Everything else Publishizer asked of me—sales arguments, comparable titles, a defined target audience, an explanation for how my book addresses the problem my target reader faces—sharpened my understanding of my own material, helping me craft an effective outgoing message to pique the interest of those in my extended personal and professional networks and motivate them to go online to order my book. Not really a book, exactly ... more the idea of a book. To preorder, that is, something which does not yet exist in the physical world, which won't appear in its corporeal form, so to speak, for several more months.
As it happens, the timing of this preorder campaign coincides with two 50th High School Reunions where I have mingled (in New Jersey last month), or will soon mingle (in Michigan this fall), with my oldest childhood friends, many of whom will no doubt be surprised, even alarmed, to discover some of their own teenage antics have made the final edit.
Word is getting out. Early responses have been heartwarming, including this one from an old high school flame:
“Thank you for sharing this with me. I pre-ordered the book. I know you are an extremely talented writer, so I look forward to reading your story.”
Never mind that she dumped me senior year. Not fun back then, but rich fodder now for the chapter on unrequited love in this current work. All is forgiven now, Kathy!
In their recent Publishizer blog feature, authors Luis R. Baptista and Juliana N. Pereira liken new writers' networks to a tree whose trunk is visible, but whose underground roots reach further than we realize. I'm discovering that now, as past connections keep coming to mind—readers of a regional chain of New York papers I wrote for in the early 2000s, members of an international affiliation of nonprofits I've worked with in the two plus decades since—one of whom will be promoting this preorder campaign with an on-air radio interview on his UK station later this week.
I'm scratching out this post between sessions at a book festival taking place here in Dalkey, south of Dublin, an annual event Salman Rushdie (who spoke here last night) famously coined, “the best little festival in the world.”
A few hours earlier, I had been chatting to Neil Jordan's wife while her husband—who wrote and directed one of my favorite Irish movies, the Oscar-nominated Michael Collins (1996)—signed books behind us. Two days before that, I sat spellbound in Dalkey's St Patrick's Church listening to the Satmar Hasidic refugee Deborah Feldman, author of Unorthodox (one of the comp titles listed on my Publishizer page), recount the tale of her harrowing escape from that famously insular religious community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Publishizer didn't send me to Dalkey, but somehow getting mixed up with this crowd has stimulated all kinds of unexpected interactions. Four additional publishers have expressed interest in my work since the campaign launched. Now it’s time to wrap this post up, get back home, and send out some more emails.
I may have found a publisher, but have yet to meet the editor I probably still need. And I suppose I'll need to reach out beyond ex-girlfriends for the preorders needed to get that done.
June 2026 (Dalkey Island in background)
To learn more about Drew, you can connect with him at:
Pre-order your own copy of Losing Our Religion on his Publishizer campaign page.
